Social sustainability and neighbourhood design: an investigation of residents' satisfaction in Delhi

Social and environmental goals are often mutually reinforcing. Urban forms may encourage social sustainability as well as social inclusion or may have the potential to create areas of crime and social exclusion. The issues of relationship between sustainable development and urban form have given birth to new paradigms of design approach such as new urbanism, the compact city and the eco-city. This paper examines the impact of urban form on social sustainability at the neighbourhood level. It seeks to better understand the relationship between urban form and social sustainability by comparing three neighbourhoods with dissimilar urban forms in Delhi, India. Household surveys and observation surveys in these three neighbourhoods were conducted, and it was found that the urban form of a neighbourhood plays a very important role in creating a socially sustainable residential neighbourhood. The study established that social interactions within the communities are higher when dwelling units are placed around the public realm or common open space. The study demonstrated that provision of high quality and well-located open space at the precinct level, mixed land use and good accessibility to the public realm and social infrastructure play an important role in increasing the social sustainability of the neighbourhood.     

From Rio to Johannesburg and Beyond: A long and winding road

This paper analyses the evolution of urban form in two North American metropolitan regions (Portland and Toronto) and asks how more sustainable regional form might come about in the future in these and other urban areas. In the past, dominant patterns of urban form have emerged in such regions at different historical periods. These morphological phases include mid 19th-century grids, streetcar suburb grids, garden suburbs, automobile suburbs and New Urbanist neighbourhoods (which have only recently made an appearance and may or may not become widespread). Judging by the performance of past types of urban morphology, five design values appear particularly important for more sustainable urban form in the future: compactness, contiguity, connectivity, diversity and ecological integration. Although these principles were not well supported by 20th-century development, contemporary movements such as the New Urbanism and Smart Growth re-emphasise them. The example of these two regions indicates that, in the absence of new technological, economic or geographical forces, public sector institutions and urban social movements represent the most likely means to bring about new, more sustainable types of urban form.     

Increasing uptake of low impact urban design and development: The role of sustainability assessment systems

Abstract

‘Market transformation’ of the significant urban development industry towards more sustainable practices is not moving at great pace. Design and assessment systems that may promote uptake of more sustainable urban design and development are reviewed briefly followed by a comparison between building and neighbourhood scales. For the latter there is a dearth of design and assessment tools for the residential built environment and of indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development. Local authorities increasingly require an integrated approach to data collection and inclusion of infrastructure service providers in design, assessment and monitoring of urban development and associated environmental effects. By examining attempts to increase uptake of more sustainable residential development, the potential for tools and indicators at the neighbourhood scale to reduce environmental impact of the built environment is highlighted. It is recommended that built environment initiatives need to be combined with research into behavioural changes to achieve the desired outcome of a sustainable built environment and to increase the dialogue between communities, developers and local authorities.     

Sustainable development control? Zoning and land use regulations for urban form,biodiversity conservation and green design in Australia

This paper examines how Australian land use plans incorporate provisions for sustainable urban form, design, biodiversity conservation, and climate change. Despite the long-standing sustainability objectives in state policy frameworks, a survey of 291 comprehensive plans finds implementation within local instruments is far from universal. Differences in patterns of policy adoption, as well as potential explanations for these differences, including geographical location, patterns of residential growth, the socio-economic composition of local communities, political forces, and policy evolution over time, are explored. Overall, areas experiencing more intensive growth tend to have newer plans, which in turn, contain more sustainability provisions, suggesting a responsive rather than repressive relationship between development pressures and regulatory development control.     

Thinking critically about smart city experimentation: entrepreneurialism and responsibilization in urban living labs

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of smart technologies, big data, and analytics is being increasingly used to address urban socio-environmental problems such as climate change mitigation and carbon control. Electricity systems in particular are being reconfigured with smart technologies to help integrate renewable generation, enhance energy efficiency, implement new forms of pricing, increase control and automation, and improve reliability. Many of these interventions are experimental, requiring real-world testing before wider diffusion. This testing often takes place in “urban living labs,” integrating urban residents as key actors in experimentation with goals for broader sustainability transitions. In this paper, I investigate one such urban living lab focused on smart grid research and demonstration in a residential neighbourhood in Austin, Texas. I develop a framework based in governmentality studies to critically interrogate urban experimentation. Findings suggest that the focus of experimentation devolves urban imperatives into individual responsibilities for socio-environmental change. Managing carbon emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and conservation is promoted as a form of self-management, wherein households reconfigure everyday activities and/or adopt new technologies. At the same, sociotechnical interventions are shaped by technology companies, researchers, and policy-makers marking a central feature of contemporary urban entrepreneurialism. This skews the potential of active co-production, and instead relies on the delegation of responsibility for action to a constrained assemblage of smart technologies and smart users.     

Sustainability speak: Discourse and practice paradigms in subdivision design

Abstract

In the last decade the concept of sustainable development has been widely embraced as the key to environmentally friendly development. However, in many instances the physical sustainability side of the equation stops at a rhetorical level and the ensuing developments fail to respond to ecological imperatives or to protect existing ecological values. Nowhere is this failure more evident than at the urban fringes of Melbourne, Australia, where residential land estate developments relentlessly engulf degraded agricultural lands that often contain the remnants of vegetative and hydrological ecological systems.

This paper postulates that while landscape design practitioners claim the ‘authority of nature’ (and, by extension, the land) for their design inspiration, in reality narrow practice foci and instrumental approaches have meant that the design of estates and subdivisions often make only token reference to ecological underpinnings. It is argued that instrumental influences on design decision-making are embedded in landscape-architectural professional culture and glossed over with an elusive rhetoric of care and concern for the environment. It is further postulated that individual expressions of interest in the land and its systems can make a substantive contribution to sustainable design practice and practical outcomes.     

Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: A comparative analysis of twenty-four US cities

After briefly reviewing some conceptual underpinnings of sustainable cities, this paper analyses and compares sustainable cities initiatives in 24 US cities. The central question addressed in the paper is why some cities seem to take sustainability more seriously than others. Numerous demographic, socioeconomic and other characteristics of the cities are correlated with an Index of Taking Sustainability Seriously, which is a composite of some 34 different variables indicating whether each city engages in specific sustainability programmes, policies or activities. Many of the standard explanations, such as the income and wealth of the community, the liberalness of the city and the growth pressures placed on the city, are found to exhibit no correlation with the seriousness of the sustainability effort. What do correlate with the Index are: reliance on manufacturing, where having more residents employed in manufacturing industries is associated with less seriousness; and, the age of the population, where cities with older populations take sustainability more seriously. This has three implications for the future development of sustainable cities. First, some of the cities that might be said to need sustainability programmes the most—cities with heavy manufacturing that are more prone to pollution production—are the least likely to take such programmes seriously. Secondly, as cities' manufacturing bases decline, they should find it increasingly feasible to engage in sustainability initiatives. And, thirdly, as the populations of cities age, policy-makers should also find it easier to support, develop and take seriously sustainability programmes.     

The deep city: cultural heritage as a resource for sustainable local transformation

ABSTRACT

The sustainable city of the future is typically envisioned as smart, creative and disruptive, assuming that urban and local sustainability is achieved through new technology and innovation. However, considering that the built environments of our cities and surroundings are highly durable, there is also a need to focus on how resources brought from the past – histories, artefacts and places – may be used for promoting urban sustainability. We label this a “deep city” perspective on urban and local transformation. By looking at Røros, a World Heritage Site in central Norway with a dense and historic wooden urban centre, we investigate how its heritage protection facilitates the maintenance of a compact urban centre. We hold that a shared sense of place – the deepness– may serve as a resource against unsustainable sprawl and mall-oriented development.     

Imagined citizens and participation: Local Agenda 21 in two communities in Sweden and Austria

Abstract

Local Agenda 21 (LA21), which has its roots in the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, aims at fostering processes of sustainable development on a local level. In this article, we compare the LA21 processes of two cities, Helsingborg in Sweden and Vienna in Austria, to seek insight into the varying implementation approaches of common international political commitments. Our focus of analysis is on the social organisation of the two processes, the way local residents are integrated into LA21 work, and especially the political images of citizens—which we call ‘imagined citizens’—that different actor groups hold. The results of the study illustrate two almost diametrically opposed organisational forms of local sustainability governance, the Swedish process relying on a more expert-led, technocratic model of implementation and the Austrian process strongly building on deliberative forms of citizen participation.     

Establishing the green neighbourhood: approaches to neighbourhood-scale sustainability certification in Portland,Oregon

ABSTRACT

While local governance is widely acknowledged as an important element in the pursuit of sustainability, local action alone is insufficient to produce lasting change. One recent solution to this quandary has been the production of certification frameworks that encourage sustainable development at the neighbourhood scale by providing local actors with standardised definitions of sustainable practices. While these frameworks facilitate the spread of sustainable development strategies between local communities, there are significant contrasts between their approaches to encouraging local sustainable development that simultaneously fulfils global objectives. This article explores these contrasts through two neighbourhood-scale sustainability certification frameworks: LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and the EcoDistricts Protocol. Analysis of these frameworks in the context of two centrally-located neighbourhoods in Portland, Oregon, reveals substantial contrasts between the two frameworks in terms of the relative flexibility of their sustainability metrics, the time frame over which decisions regarding sustainable development are made, and community involvement in the process of pursuing specific objectives. Furthermore, it suggests that greater flexibility in the application of standards, continuous governance, and greater community involvement lead to more dynamic and holistic forms of sustainability that evolve as both local community needs and broader understandings of sustainability change over time.     

Sustainability versus liveability: an investigation of neighbourhood satisfaction

Recent years have witnessed an increasing emphasis placed on planning systems in most advanced capitalist societies to develop a more sustainable urban development pattern, resulting in policies to increase residential densities. Although belief in the virtues of the compact city approach is now widespread among the policy community, questions remain relating to the ‘sustainability versus liveability’ implications of compact city environments. In this regard, while the public may support sustainability principles, there is a perception that high-density development poses too great a cost on individuals' quality of life. Combining both quantitative and qualitative research data, this paper evaluates the relationship between high-density living and neighbourhood satisfaction within the central city. Findings suggest that, in many instances, it is not high density per se that is the source of dissatisfaction for respondents, but rather other related factors such as environmental quality, noise, lack of community involvement, traffic and lack of services and facilities.     

Delivering social sustainability in the inner-city: the transformation of South-West Montreal,Quebec (Canada)

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how social sustainability is implemented in private-led regeneration processes and which understanding of the “social” foregrounds the implementation of sustainability in Montreal. The case studies are two new residential projects led by the private sector participating in the transformation of the Southwest Borough in Montreal. The analysis is based on six components used to evaluate the operationalisation of social sustainability for new residential projects as well on the analysis of opportunities to negotiate the “social” in the implementation of sustainability. The two case studies, Griffintown and the Bassins-du-Nouveau Havre projects are examples of brownfield regeneration in a former industrial area along the Lachine Canal known as the South West Borough. We have used semi-structured interviews with the stakeholders as the main source for data collection, a review of press articles and an analysis of the principal planning documents related to each project. If the second example is more convincing in regards to the operationalisation of social sustainability, there is a lack of incentives for developers to integrate social sustainability principles in their development in the Montreal context. Planning instruments should impose more constraints on developers and municipalities should have more financial resources to negotiate with developers what the “social” should be.     

Measuring sustainability performance of local food production in home gardens

The growing interests in “local food” in recent years in public discussions, research and practice highlight its significant importance as a part of overall food system. This research compares spatially local food production potential of home gardens in nine residential neighbourhood case studies with varying physical densities at a local scale using geographic information systems and mathematical methods. This paper develops a “local food energy model” for measuring sustainability potential of growing local food mainly vegetables in the home gardens. The outcomes indicate that potential of the home gardens in supplying vegetables demand as a share of total dietary energy would depend on the morphological characteristics of urban forms, total resident population, total food demand and other related factors. Local food production in the home gardens could meaningfully contribute towards building a sustainable food future.     

Human Habitat,Space and Place

This article is a conceptual contribution on how to make human habitat more sustainable. Taking Heidegger’s conception of “dwelling” as a starting point, a new form of understanding the organization of the city as a human habitat is proposed. It is argued that human habitat is today in crisis and that such crisis has its roots in a spatial understanding of human dwelling, disregarding its temporal-historical dimension. For long time, the city has been considered as a physical “place” and its organization—the urban planning—has been addressed in terms of “locating” (building). Many of the challenges in organizing habitat are the result of reducing the organization of the city to the organization of physical space. One of these is the conflict between preservation and development, a central issue in approaching sustainability. The aim of this article is to propose a new perspective on the organization of human dwelling, which overcomes the spatial-based conception of habitat and involves its temporal dimension. The meaning of human “habitat” as a historical process for developing “habits” will be recovered, and the implications for organization of the city considered. Human habitat is above all an ethical space (ethos), constituted in a spatial–temporal process of developing learning and capabilities. This habitat can be shared and developed infinitely so that a pathway is opened for overcoming the logic of competition and the conflict between sustainability and development. Finally, three forms of the human habitat as an “ethical space” are proposed.     

Views of the City: Multiple pathways to sustainable transport futures

In this paper we look behind the notion of sustainable transport and highlight the tensions and contradictions between the different ways of achieving this. The paper examines transportation plans for a major UK city and describes how these develop the idea and practice of sustainable transport and demand management along three quite distinct trajectories. By focusing on both the technological and the institutional dimensions of three different routes to sustainable transport, the analysis explicates the different ways in which the urban transport problem is framed, the different socio-technical logics of demand management embodied in the plans and the differing ways in which institutional relationships are (re)constituted. A key finding is that technological and institutional innovations are inversely related so that radical technological innovation often serves to reinforce existing social relations of power and exclusion. The conclusion drawn is that the choice is not just between a sustainable and an unsustainable transport future, but also between different forms of sustainability.     

Implicating waterfronts in regional sustainability

Advocates of sustainable urban development often privilege the region as a scale for coordinated action and investment. However, discourses of sustainability institutionalised through regional planning, and conflated with notions of liveability, lend themselves to recruitment by competing, and opposing, development interests. To be regionally sustainable, an individual land development should, both on-site and through its connections to other sites, contribute to overall sustainability of the region. Using examples of industrial waterfront redevelopment in metropolitan Vancouver, we show how particular urban spaces are misrepresented as lynchpins of regional sustainability. In a plan for residential redevelopment, it is claimed that sustainable redevelopment will reunite citizens with “their waterfront”, reframed as liveable, pure, clean, ecologically vital and non-industrial. At an adjacent site, it is claimed that waterfront industrial land should be protected to combat industrial sprawl. Yet, in both cases the developers have lobbied for the expansion of road transportation making the claims of regional sustainability doubtful.     

A framework for assessing the sustainability of brownfield developments

In England, the development of urban brownfield sites is a significant planning policy aimed at supporting urban regeneration and protecting the countryside. Brownfield sites are required, in policy, to be developed in a sustainable way. However, determining what this means in practice is unclear. This paper presents a framework for assessing the sustainability of brownfield developments, devised to clarify the stakeholders in land reuse and establish how sustainability can be achieved on reused sites. The framework has been used in research investigating the sustainability of five brownfield developments in England. The performance of the framework in this research is assessed and its potential practical use outlined.     

The effect of age,gender and marital status on residential satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Residential satisfaction is a vital component of individual quality of life which has been explored by researchers from different perspectives. This study takes the stance to investigate residential satisfaction from sociodemographic standpoints. The purpose is to contribute to further research on residential satisfaction by exploring specifically the impact of age, gender and marital status on overall residential satisfaction and in more detail with components of residential satisfaction of residents living in apartment buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Quantitative analyses of a survey of 204 residents living 59 apartment buildings in Dhaka was conducted to examine whether there is any relation between residential satisfaction with age, gender and marital status of the apartment dwellers. This study also examined if these sociodemographic characteristics had a moderator effect on some of the key components of residential satisfaction. Primary findings indicate that there exists a significant relationship between residential satisfaction with age, gender, and marital status. Further analysis revealed that the “Married” group was more satisfied than the “Single/Never married” group, senior people tend to be more satisfied than are younger respondents and females were more satisfied than males concerning overall residential satisfaction. This study concludes that potential sociodemographic differences among households in apartment developments in Dhaka should be considered for effective residential satisfaction and to create a socially sustainable living environment.     

The Evolution of Urban Form in Portland and Toronto: implications for sustainability planning

This paper analyses the evolution of urban form in two North American metropolitan regions (Portland and Toronto) and asks how more sustainable regional form might come about in the future in these and other urban areas. In the past, dominant patterns of urban form have emerged in such regions at different historical periods. These morphological phases include mid 19th-century grids, streetcar suburb grids, garden suburbs, automobile suburbs and New Urbanist neighbourhoods (which have only recently made an appearance and may or may not become widespread). Judging by the performance of past types of urban morphology, five design values appear particularly important for more sustainable urban form in the future: compactness, contiguity, connectivity, diversity and ecological integration. Although these principles were not well supported by 20th-century development, contemporary movements such as the New Urbanism and Smart Growth re-emphasise them. The example of these two regions indicates that, in the absence of new technological, economic or geographical forces, public sector institutions and urban social movements represent the most likely means to bring about new, more sustainable types of urban form.